Music

Badfinger Gets Sales Bump After ‘Breaking Bad’ Finale

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In the pivotal final scene of Breaking Bad (No spoilers ahead, but really, why haven’t you watched the finale yet?!) fans found out the fate of Walter White while Badfinger’s song, “Baby Blue” played in the background. But it turns out, the song–off the band’s 1971 album, Straight Up–wasn’t relegated to the background at all. In the five days since the final episode aired people have been talking about Badfinger. A lot. And might even be listening to them right now.

The Monday (September 30) after the series finale, which raked in 10.3 million viewers, streams of “Baby Blue” on Spotify rose nine-thousand percent. By the end of that same day, the song’s streams on services including Spotify, Rhapsody, Slacker, AOL Radio, VidZone, Rdio, and Xbox Music were up over twenty-thousand percent, according to Billboard.

People also bought the song 5,300 times after the episode aired. To put it in perspective, the week before the finale “Baby Blue” sold 200 copies. The Breaking Bad bump also helped sales of their other songs like “Without You,” “Day After Day,” “Come and Get It,” and “No Matter What,” leading to a 656 percent sales boost for the band.

Badfinger’s music, specifically “Baby Blue,” has been featured on TV and in movies before, most recently being used in Martin Scorcese’s 2006 film, The Departed, which was what inspired Breaking Bad’s creator Vince Gilligan to pick the song to begin with.But none of those appearances, which included a cover of the song on an episode of The OC, were as iconic as the finale of Breaking Bad or as fitting for Heisenberg and his empire of blue meth with its chorus of “Didn’t know you’d think that I’d forget or I’d regret, the special love I had for you, my baby blue.”